


High magic

by morganstern



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 16:41:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2819063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganstern/pseuds/morganstern
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bran and Will reforge their friendship, after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	High magic

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magelette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magelette/gifts).



Bran wasn’t altogether surprised to receive a letter from Will, enclosed with a letter his father had sent him from back home in Gwynedd. Will had stayed in touch, written faithfully at least twice a year, though whether out of a feeling of duty to a family friend, or actual curiosity Bran couldn’t say. He replied every time, though, even if the words didn’t come particularly easily to him. No matter how ordinary the other boy seemed, there had always been something about Will that made Bran take notice of him, woke a little voice inside of him that whispered, _Keep this one close. He’s special._

Will wrote that his aunt Jen had told him that Bran was starting university at The Bartlett this year. Will would be in London in a couple weeks; would it be all right if he stopped by to visit? Phone number enclosed.

 _It’s probably going to be awkward,_ Bran told himself as he left the student residence in search of a payphone, but the glad spark of happiness that the letter had ignited refused to be snuffed by mere good sense.

*

Even in London, people still stared at Bran. He didn’t like the way they looked at him, as though he they were tourists, and he was the pretty lake or picturesque mountain they’d come to see. No one made signs against the Evil Eye when they saw him. That kind of country superstition wasn’t at all in fashion here; Londoners had their own way of making people feel like freaks.

Bran didn’t miss Wales. He missed people, things, landscapes - but never to the point where he could delude himself into thinking that he truly wanted to move back. There was nothing for him there.

London was better. Pretty much anything was better than being the deacon’s creepy son, attending school with his peers back in Welsh sheep country. At UCL, abnormality worn with confidence equalled artistic eccentricity, not ostracism. It felt strange, like wearing an old and ragged coat to a new place, only to have it acclaimed as the height of fashion. Even if you were expecting - or at least hoping - that it would be well-received, the familiar piece of clothing still sat differently on you, chafed in new places.

Enough of his classmates thought that his appearance was part of some kind of act - his hair was bleached, they claimed. He’d overheard one boy complain about his sunglasses, which he still wore defiantly indoors.

“I’m sick to death of his little Andy Warhol schtick,” he’d said. 

Bran didn’t see the point in enlightening them. It wasn’t the worst he’d heard.

*

The first time Will saw Bran’s studio, he wasn’t sure what he’d find. He wasn’t even sure he knew what he hoped to see. Bran didn’t speak much about the past, even their shared past, and sometimes Will felt on uncertain ground with him. To Bran, was he the boy who’d shared so many adventures, been through mortal peril with? Or was he just family of his father’s landlord, a boyhood acquaintance, who stopped by to visit from time to time? Art was a reflection of the soul, and surely if Bran did remember anything, it would show in his art.

Merriman and the Lady had wanted Bran to forget. Will trusted that they knew best - truly, he did. But there was also a part of him that couldn’t bear to think that Bran really did remember nothing of all the things they’d been through together. 

When Bran showed him around his residence, he led him into the small room that apparently served him as both bedroom and artist’s studio, and then begged off to make them some tea. 

“Some host I am,” he said. “Have a look around while I do. Nothing here is private - not from you, anyway.” He smiled briefly at Will and left, before Will had to figure out what to say in reply.

There were sketches hung on the walls with pins, as though it was one big bulletin board. Examining them all in turn, he saw faces he knew: John Rowlands. Owen Davies. A bearded man with a gentle face, robed in blue. The high peaks of Cader Idris; a grey stone cottage with broken door; a flaming sword. A tower domed in crystal and gold, rising out of a sea of green-leaved branches.

In pride of place was a painting on canvas that was so bright it look like golden light shone out of it. It was the City of Cantr’er Gwaelod, the Lost Land. Not drowned and broken, as they’d seen it last, but whole and filled with light. _"It's such a... well-made place,"_ he remembered Bran saying, and thought he understood now why Bran had been so sure of his ambition to become an architect.

 _What a loss,_ he thought, looking at the picture, an unexpected pang striking him. It had been such a happy place, a prosperous city with happy people - all destroyed by the malice of the Dark.

“Tea?” he heard from the open doorway behind him. Bran was watching him, box of Lipton in his hand. He brandished it as Will came back to that time and place. “Kettle’s just boiled,” he said, and Will let himself be drawn back to the kitchen.

“Some real sword and sorcery stuff you’ve got going on in there,” Will said, deliberately flippant.

Bran shrugged, and suddenly seemed to pay very close attention to his tea. His shoulders were slightly hunched. “Yeah, well, my art teachers liked it,” he said. “So did the admissions board here, once I started going on about dreams and the subconscious and all that kind of thing.”

“It’s pretty brilliant,” Will said, with absolute honesty. “You dreamed all of that?”

Bran met his eyes again, and the uncertainty in his expression gave Will the answer he needed - uncertainty that Will would understand or accept his work, tinged with an underlying confusion that Bran himself might not quite be aware of.

“I get images in dreams, sometimes,” Bran said, with the halting voice of someone trying to put the indescribable into words. “I wake up, and there’s one image that stays with me, like it’s burned into the inside of my eyelids, until I draw it.”

 _He doesn’t remember,_ Will thought, and tasted disappointment more bitter than he’d prepared himself for. All at once, he missed their old friendship, that easy camaraderie that he’d never felt with anyone else before or since.

Something still remained, though, deep in Bran’s mind. Did trust, love and faith still remain if one couldn’t remember why one felt them?

*

 _Those dreams... half the time, you’re in them too,_ Bran very carefully did not say. There was confiding in an old childhood friend - and there was being stupid.

*

It was easy to rekindle that old friendship with Bran, now that both of them were adults and lived just a train ride apart. Will enjoyed the time they spent together with a fierceness that surprised him. Bran was still Bran: loyal, funny, sometimes cutting, always a good friend. Life at uni wasn’t quite like being sent on fateful quests for the Light, but neither was it entirely different, Will found out as they struggled through student life, with its social and academic minefields.

The two of them were returning from a party at a friend’s flat one night, walking together in companionable silence, when Bran spoke.

“I remember some of it, you know,” he said suddenly. Will turned to look at him, startled.

“Some of what?” he asked. Needlessly, because of course he already knew, no matter how impossible it was. 

Bran raised his eyes to meet Will’s, who was standing still, transfixed. Bran’s eyes were filled with an almost painful trepidation, mixed with hope. “You know what I’m talking about,” he said. “Secret halls in the mountains, monsters in the lake - swords and magic and lost cities...” He broke Will’s gaze, looked away. “For a while I wasn’t sure what was real - I thought I might be going mad, with two sets of memories - but I’ve had some time to think about it.”

“It’s real,” Will said, without quite meaning to. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. He felt frozen in uncertainty. Bran _remembered_ \- some of it, a lot of it, at the least. That hadn’t been supposed to happen. 

“Are you going to make me forget now?” Bran asked.

The tone of his voice stayed casual, or what would have passed as casual to someone who didn’t know him well, but Will could sense the apprehension underneath. This, then, was Bran’s fear - stronger even than his fear of being mad: the fear of losing the true memories of his childhood, the memories that inspired him in his art, and were his last connection to his birth parents.

Will had already made his decision, he realized. He sighed, and accepted it. “No,” he said. He could feel Bran’s immediate release of tension, even without having to look at him. “It’s not my mandate or my place to alter the workings of Old Ones greater than I, at least not without pressing cause. For all I know, you were meant to remember eventually. Or - you were born a child of High Magic, and though I thought you gave all of that up when you chose to stay, some power might have remained with you. Perhaps enough to break the spell of forgetting that was put on you.”

“So my birth father - ” Bran began. “He really is… _King Arthur?_ ” His voice was tinged with amazement and incredulity, as though he still couldn’t bring himself to entirely believe his own memories.

“He really is,” Will said.

They walked in silence for a few steps, and then Bran chuckled to himself.

“So I guess that makes you my Merlin,” Bran said with a smirk and a sly, sideways glance.

Will couldn’t help but feel a rush of pleasure at the possessive ‘my’. “Yeah, pretty much,” he said, and put some effort into not doing something like shuffle his feet. “Not that that makes either of us sound full of ourselves,” he added wryly.

“Us? Never,” Bran said with mock-innocence.

Will snorted and shoved Bran’s shoulder with his own. “Speak for yourself,” he said. His mock irritation wasn’t particularly convincing, though, because he couldn’t make himself stop smiling.

*


End file.
